


a phoenix, from someone else's ashes

by Legendaerie



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mind Manipulation, Not a ship-centric fic, Past Child Abuse, RvB Angst War, Slight potential dub-con, torture mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 11:05:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6563788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legendaerie/pseuds/Legendaerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>based on a prompt by freshzombiewriter: AU where Carolina took Sigma, and became the Meta. ;)</p><p>----</p><p>In which Carolina burns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a phoenix, from someone else's ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry this didn't get the full treatment like Save and Restore did. I've got a lot of personal stuff going on right now and just fired this off in a few hours.
> 
> this is like Yikes the Fanfic, so... have fun?

 

“How're you feeling, champ?”

York's voice is warm but all she wants is a cold shower; she feels like she's burning from the inside out, fever-hot and fever-dizzy as Sigma snakes through her veins and syncs into Carolina's skin. It hurts, it sears - and then she/he/they opens her eyes, and she sees everyone - not Texas, though, everyone that matters - clustered around her bed like a welcoming group. Like a birthday party.

Carolina shakes her head and some of the fever dies down to a flush across the back of her neck, a sunburn on her shoulders that makes her twitch under the armor like a horse with a fly on its flank. She wonders if her body is trying to fight him off like an infection, or if it's just the lingering heat as the anesthesia wears off. The inside of her mouth tastes like latex and artificial sweetener and ashes from the IV.

“Good,” she says, and it's only ten percent a lie.

 

* * *

 

CT leaves, but she doesn't go far enough. Nothing can outrun the Project for long, and while Carolina is hurt and furious she's also glad they found her so fast. Sigma doesn't understand at first why she cares beyond the armor, but he still promises to give her his full attention on this mission. He's not too bad, once she gets over how his voice makes her skin sting like she's breaking out in hives.

They're at the seaside shipyard and York and Washington are pinned down, despite her efforts. There's half a dozen snipers on the roof, and it's not worth getting one of her still-loyal teammates killed to bring a prodigal one home.

“Damn it,” she hisses into her helmet, and she's about ready to radio North when Sigma speaks, flickering to ambiguously burning life in front of her visor.

“If I may, Agent Carolina? I believe I can offer some insight into our situation.”

“Show me what you can do,” she prompts, and he dips his head in reply.

A series of images flicker through her mind like vivid lucid dreams, faster than conscious thought, of all the things they could do together; she pours a smile into her voice so he can see it underneath her helmet.

“I think that's a wonderful idea, Sig. Let’s try… the third one?”

“Of course.”

He jumps back inside her, warm like whiskey going down her spine as she initiates the speed unit. Before she could outrun cars but now - now with Sigma nudging her reflexes in the right direction, she can outrun _bullets_.

The six men on the rooftop are dead before they hit the ground.

“Son of a bitch,” breathes Wash into his helmet mike. “I mean, not you-- I mean, I don't mean to call you a bitch or anything, I just--”

“Yeah,” and by Washington's grunt it sound like York slapped him on the shoulder. “Nice job, Carolina. We're right behind you.”

Behind her. Below her. It doesn't matter because all she can think about is what she can do with this. Is this what North feels like? York? Why didn't they ever tell her it could feel like this, like a whole world has opened up to her, an entirely new sense and understanding.

 _They’re not like you and I,_ Sigma assures her. _What we have is special._

“Let's go find CT,” she says to her friends below, and leaves them in the dust to hunt down their missing piece.

She doesn't need cover fire when they face down the toy-painted twins - she doesn't need anyone when she charges past Wyoming and the still-bleeding Florida, and she especially doesn't need Texas showing up just outside the last door.

“You must be Agent Texas,” Sigma says, flickering between them like a candle. “A pleasure to--”

“Introductions can wait. Can't keep your AI in check, Carolina?” Texas snipes, but Carolina can hear undercurrents in her words, a filter of Someone Else coloring her tone.

 _Interesting,_ she/he/they think, and Carolina radios York. “We need you to cut the power.”

“Little busy here!”

“Just do it,” she hisses, and shoots another look at Texas. Sigma is curious about her too, hidden away to nothing but an itch at the base of her skull, and she wonders--

_Carolina dives for Texas, knocks the first gun out of her hands. A block, a blow, a counter and Texas wrestles another firearm into view; three bullets miss their mark and one hits, then as the door falls open Carolina hits the ground with lead in her shoulder, incapacitated as Texas reaps the rest of the rebellion. Goes home clad in blood and glory._

\-- if there could ever be a day that she could beat Texas,

 _Not yet_ , Sigma warns her, before the lights die and both women slip into the shadows, melding into the darkness.

They take CT in bleeding but alive.

 

* * *

 

Two days later, Agent Connecticut is nothing but a heap of ashes in the ship incinerator and an empty suit, and her closest friend is absent from lunch as he mourns. She should care, but it's like she's beating against a glass wall in her own mind. Trapped inside, helpless to do anything but spectate.

“Did Wash get a chance to say goodbye?” North asks from across the table, his voice low and concerned. York shakes his head stiffly before he sits down beside Carolina.

“Her injuries were too bad, even for us. She never woke up.”

A lie. She woke up but never talked, no matter what they did to her. Not that York knows, but he seems to suspect - she can feel it in the weight of his gaze, in the beat of silence before he speaks with his voice falsely buoyant, as if it can bring her out of the depth of her thoughts. And for a moment, she wants more than anything to break the surface and just, for the first time in weeks, breathe.

“You seem to be taking to Sigma pretty well,” he says, and doesn't startle when the AI shimmers into visibility on the tabletop. “Nice work out there, both of you.”

“Please,” Sigma says, “I'm simply doing my best to bring out the skills Carolina already has. Doesn't Delta do the same for you?”

"Nah, usually he just complains whenever I take too long on a lock or something. So,” and his tone of voice shifts and he turns entirely to face Carolina, “feel like showing me a few of those stunts you picked up? It all happened pretty fast, but I'm pretty sure I saw you shoot someone in the face with their own sniper rifle, and I'm always down to--”

“Sorry,” she/he/they say, as she rises to dump the rest of her uneaten food into the organic recycling bin, “I have my own private training to do today.”

“Oh. Um... some other time, then?”

Maybe. She does miss him, a little bit - misses having a partner who can actually block and counter her blows and still laugh about it afterwards, misses having someone who reminds her not to be so serious all the time.

And then she catches sight of the leaderboard, sees, finally, her name above Texas; and Carolina realizes she can do a hell of a lot better than York.

 

* * *

 

But the glow doesn't last for long. It never does. Pride only comes to her in flashes, in moments that melt like sugar on her tongue. Like when she was a child and her father shadowed her at her every accomplishment, soaking up all of the praise and leaving none for her. Making her relive every mistake in painstaking detail as they drove home, finding all the myriad ways she went wrong and showing her all the things she didn't think to do but that she swears to do next time. Rinse. Repeat. 

Her name slips below Texas on the leaderboard after a mission and two months ago she would have stormed out of the control room, would have raged and burned herself out. But today she/he/they inhales before she speaks, and her voice is perfectly amicable.

“If I may ask where I went wrong on today's mission?” she asks politely, and Wash's helmet spins around so fast it looks like it's on a pivot.

The counselor matches her tone, cool and dark and empty as the void of space surrounding them. “With all due respect, Carolina, you left your team behind.”

The memory irks where it should hurt, and Carolina's shoulder shifts, the skin raw in patches against the hard edges of her armor. “I had to use the speed unit to catch the truck.”

“But South got shot, Carolina,” and the Director isn't any of those things, just an old man with his hands on the steering wheel and left her no escape but the pavement skidding past at seventy miles per hour. “You could have prevented it.”

“North could have used his--”

“Are you questioning my judgement, Carolina?”

 _Yes._ “No.”

“Very well. Dismissed.”

Wash reaches out, maybe, to touch her shoulder - and when she turns, pulling her helmet on to hide her face he retreats like he's been burned.

 

* * *

 

Metastability.

She pours herself into studying it, into training, into everything; her sleep is brief but deep and alight with dreams as Sigma shows her vision of a future. Of their future, bringing all the pieces back together. Delta, Gamma, Theta - even the new ones in South and Maine. They could do great things together. They could end this war.

They could be unstoppable, if only the Director would just _listen_. But of course he doesn't, because he never listened when she was growing up away.

One of those nights, when she breaks yet another record on the training room floor, York meets her on her way out, carelessly fragile in his civvies.

“Hey,” he says in the voice Sigma reminds her he only uses for Carolina, the one that's gentle at the edges despite how she's been avoiding him for weeks. “Leave some records for other people to break, why don't you?”

Her skin is sweat sticky and she pulls off her helmet to breathe, heat coming off her in waves. “Not my fault if you can't keep up,” Carolina says with a grin; his reaction borders on relief as his teeth flash in an answering smile.

“You're the one with the speed unit.” His eyes darken as she shakes out her hair, runs her fingers through it, watches him watch her. “Anyway. I should probably,” York swallows, “let you get to the showers.”

Being human. She feels like she's forgetting how to be one sometimes, even as she's learning to be something else entirely. Someone else. Carolina steps into York's personal space, backing him up out of the sweeping eye of the camera, and he/she/they lean in.

“Don't want to join me?” is breathed in the inches of space between them, her fingertips skimming up the back of his neck, circling the cold AI sockets at the base of his skull - and then she drags him in for a crushing kiss, trapping them between the wall and her armor.

Conjoined, breaking apart only to breathe as he follows her back to her quarters, York yields under her/his/their touch, just as burning-bright and desperate as she feels. And afterwards, when her hips are still shifting on him, around him in the wake of it all, Carolina feels one step closer to feeling whole.

 

* * *

 

York gives her advice the whole way down to the training room floor, following her like a dog on a leash. “Texas might try to bait you into attacking first, but don't fall for it. She'll learn your moves and use them against you. I mean, you've got the speed unit so you'll be better off than we were-- than I was, at least, so--”

“York,” Carolina says, grenade in hand. “We got this.”

“I know, I know,” and his head jerks up when F.I.L.S.S. reminds him, again, to get off the floor, “just... don't die out there.”

The marks she left on his skin have faded - Carolina knows that without looking - but he rubs the spot on his neck anyway. And there's a moment, abrupt like a splash of cold water, that she looks at him. Really looks, and sees something she could have wanted more than number one on the leaderboard, long ago.

“ _Match begin,_ ” says a sweet voice, and the moment evaporates. York jogs out of the line of fire as Carolina and Texas circle each other like hungry wolves, seeking to devour the other.

No. Not wolves. Carolina is no flesh-and-blood beast. She is fire, and she will burn Texas black like her bones, black like his/her/their heart.

And then a name erupts in the back of her mind like a gunshot, and Carolina is screaming as Sigma tears himself apart in her mind, trying at the same time to remember and forget. It is a pain like she's never known, one that eats her alive from the inside, electric blue and army green and ashen grey on her tongue. The medical team isn't coming, why aren't they coming, why isn't anybody stopping this? Someone has to stop this, can't they see what he's doing, can't they see why can't she see why can't she can't she can't can't she--

“This is for your own good,” says Texas, cloaked in shadow like death itself, and Carolina drowns in unconsciousness.

 

* * *

 

Suspicion is a virus, eating away at iron wills like rust, eroding the core of the Project. The ripples of CT's death reached further than even Sigma could predict, and as the sirens go off inside the ship Carolina realizes that she can't beat Texas like this.

So she takes a different turn, following her instincts as the ship pitches around her, and she jogs single-mindedly down the rolling hallway. A pit stop or two first - the medical bay, where Washington is still locked in throes of agony from his reaction to Epsilon. No use wasting an AI, right?

But someone stops her when she reaches the elevator, the cool lighting casting his golden armor in purple tones. She raises a plasma pistol at chest height, trains it on the apex of his breastplate, four inches above and five to the right of his heart.

“Carolina,” York says, in the voice he only uses for her, in a voice he's never used for her because it's heavy and breaking under the weight of it all. “Let's not do this. It doesn't have to be this way.”

“You're right, York.” Sigma burns on the edge of her vision, and York's helmet twitches to keep him out of his blind spot. "It doesn't. Help us against Texas, Delta. She's trying to tear us all apart.”

Delta doesn’t answer, but she sees him in the lines of York’s body, green and bright like sunlight through the leaves of trees. Sees them both hesitate.

“No she isn't. Texas isn't the problem here.” York's attention flickers back to Carolina, his gun still held across his chest. “You don't have to beat her. Come on. We can still do the right thing. We can leave and--”

“And what? Let everyone else burn themselves out?” Carolina is speaking this time, her voice unsteady without Sigma's warm support. “Live in the shadows, like criminals?”

“We are criminals, Carolina. But we can still make some things right. Please.” He straps the gun to his back in a sign of faith, steps into her personal space unarmed but still so, so dangerous. “This isn't like you. You can trust me.”

She can.

She almost does.

“But you can't trust me,” she/he/they say, and in the milliseconds before York shifts into a fighting stance, she strikes.

They know each other too well for it to be anything other than an even match - where fighting Texas is like fighting her shadow, a shadow that always seems to engulf her, fighting York is like fighting her counterpart. He blocks when she strikes, strikes when she blocks, and it's like a dance.

Carolina only realizes how slow she's going when Sigma activates the speed unit. And then it's seconds, mere laughable seconds before he goes down, spinning weightlessly in the elevator shaft.

“Carolina,” he breathes one last time, like a prayer, and she wonders--

_She takes his outstretched hand and pulls York down beside her, presses her armor against his and begs for him to just take the damn things out because she's fever-hot, fever-sick and burning from the inside out, eaten alive like a cordyceps mushroom and she doesn't want to finish what the Director started, not like this._

_He takes his outstretched hand and yanks York down beside him, ducks into his blind side, presses the muzzle of his plasma gun into the hollow part of his armor and fires six bolts directly into his ribcage to let the fire burn out his lungs and his heart so he feels just as empty, just as hollow and see if he can stand back and play the hero now._

\-- if York would have given Delta to her if she'd asked.

But they rip out the sockets in his neck and leave him behind in the elevator, and she/he/he/they glow like a supernova as she hunts Texas down.

They land on the walls of the next hallway down, a shadow facing down an echo. Every edge in Texas' body is knife-sharp, dark and her; no trace of the lingering purple that usually creeps in at the edges.

“Don't try to stop me,” Texas warns.

“There will be no try this time,” Sigma replies, and hits her with all the force and speed of a lightning bolt.

 

* * *

 

Not even the snow can stop the heat in her bones. Not even the sun on the expanse of white can outshine her. She rises above the limp, black body with the flickering shapes of Beta and Omega orbiting her like planets, and she shines and shines and burns resplendent, like the firebirds of legend. 

She walks back to the crashed ship, where the Director is just pulling himself out of the rubble, and she spreads her empty hands wide.

“Well?” she asks, in a voice that isn't Carolina, isn't Texas or Sigma or Delta or Omega or anyone but the Meta - warm with satisfaction, bright with joy, one step closer to whole. “Am I everything that you thought I could be?”

 


End file.
